Biography

b. 1939, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Pat O’Neill is an American independent experimental filmmaker and artist. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking films which blend iconography, surrealism, humor and sound design to reveal his interest in the connections and divisions between humans and nature. His films illustrate the materiality of sound, images, and pacing as well as his avant-garde use of the optical printer. In addition to filmmaking, O’Neill began working with sculpture in the early 1960s. Initially, he worked with surrealistic and erotic assemblages of wood and metal. His vision then shifted and he began to create highly polished forms made out of fiberglass and plexiglass of whimsical and sometimes suggestive forms such as wooden horns, wavy forms wrapped in fur, and pickles. The artist’s gestures and mark-making seem obscure, but there is plasticity to his images, and sophistication to his techniques.

Pat O'Neill lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962 and continued at UCLA to be the first American to receive a Master’s degree in Moving Image Art in 1964. O’Neill was active in the West Coast film scene and was a founding member of Oasis, a collaboratively run experimental film exhibitor in Los Angeles. His film Water and Power won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and his complete collection resides at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive. O’Neill’s work has been featured in prominent exhibitions such as Electric Art at The University of California, Los Angeles (1969); The Whitney Biennial, New York (1991); and Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital at The Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). His works are included in the colections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Three Answers

April 20 – August 4, 2019

Pat O'Neill at Villa Arson Nice

Los Angeles, les années cool / Judy Chicago

July 1 – November 4, 2018

Pat O'Neill is included in the group show Los Angeles, les anées cool / Judy Chicago at Villa Arson in Nice. The exhibition is centered around Chicago and includes artworks by other west coast contemporaries.

Pat O'Neill at Tate Modern

Where the Chocolate Mountains

November 23, 2017

In 2017, the Tate Modern's ARTISTS' CINEMA film series will expand the conversation between film and live performance, and examine artists’ various approaches to ethnography and the representation of cultural identities. The series will also feature the UK premiere of Pat O’Neill’s stunning experimental film Where the Chocolate Mountains.

Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive

September 28 – November 27, 2016

Pat O'Neill at The Whitney

Water and Power

November 20, 2016

In conjunction with the exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905 - 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be screening Pat O'Neill's 1989 film, Water and Power, on Sunday, November 20th at 3 pm.

Pat O'Neill at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Where the Chocolate Mountains

January 14, 2016

In the spring of 2015, with the assistance of a Creative Capital grant, O’Neill completed a new feature film entitled Where the Chocolate Mountains. Following the New York debut at Anthology Film Archives earlier this year, Mitchell-Innes & Nash is excited to be screening this new feature for a one-night-only event at the Chelsea gallery. Refreshments and snacks will be served; no RSVP required. Run time is 55 minutes.

Pat O'Neill Screening at the University of Washington

Early Films

January 8, 2015

Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington will present a selection of short films produced by experimental filmmaker and artist, Pat O'Neill. The program features a number of key early works, including 7362 (1967), a three-screen version of Runs Good (1970), Easy Out (1971), Last of the Persimmons (1972), and Down Wind (1973). Art Historian Johanna Gosse will introduce the films and lead a post-screening Q&A.

Pat O'Neill Screening at Anthology Film Archives

Where the Chocolate Mountains

Sunday, December 13

In the spring of 2015, with the assistance of a Creative Capital grant, Pat O’Neill completed a new feature film entitled Where the Chocolate Mountains. Mitchell-Innes & Nash is excited to be screening this new feature for a one day only event at Anthology Film Archives on Sunday December 13, 2015 at 1 pm. The film has a 55 minute run time and will followed by a discussion between Pat O’Neill and independent curator Tina Kukielski.

Press

The works on display raises questions about the self in relation to others, collective norms, and the built environment. Through their distinct process and subject matter, each artist points out the links and fissures in our lives and the larger systems that we attempt to grapple with from science to spirituality and spaces in between. O’Neill’s two-channel projection environment, ‘No Wonder - Two Skins’ (2013) and Fleming’s multichannel video installation, ‘A Theory of Everything’ (2015) creates a chronological bridge between the works, suggesting a comparison of American society of the past and present. Both artists use found collage and original to create new stories that are devoid of a straight narrative and cinematic convention.

CALIFORNIA ABOUNDS WITH BEGUILING PLACE NAMES. The divergence between promise and reality may be no greater than in the case of the Chocolate Mountains. Stretching more than sixty miles across the Colorado Desert that traverses Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California, they form a geography that few Californians have seen, let alone visited. Home to the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, a practice site used by the Navy and Marines and inaccessible to the public, the region’s arid and inhospitable topography is magnified by the unsettling thought that somewhere over a distant crest shimmering in the heat the weapons that will be deployed in the wars of tomorrow are being tested today.

Pat O’Neill’s Where the Chocolate Mountains (2015) nimbly plays on these associations. Although we never actually see the mountains, we hear their name spoken by a character on the soundtrack of an old film noir, one of many elements that O’Neill transforms into a wholly new and vital substance, confirmation that he remains the master alchemist of Los Angeles experimental cinema. Instructional films, B movies, Caruso, and 1920s jazz are but some of the ingredients in a rich visual and sonic mix realized with his longtime collaborator, George Lockwood.

Los Angeles-based artist Pat O’Neill has been making work for the last 50 years, and yet it’s rarely seen in New York. A key figure in West Coast experimental cinema, O’Neill is probably best known for highly plastic and technically accomplished films like his lysergic 7362 (1967) or his extraordinary 35mm feature Water and Power (1989), an experimental documentary concerning, among many things, the development of the Los Angeles Basin from prehistory to the present. But since the start of his career O’Neill has also been involved in an astonishing range of media—photography, sculpture, collage, and installation, in both commercial and independent spheres. Now in his late seventies, O’Neill is the subject of his first New York solo exhibition, which offers a concise but judicious sampling of his varied output.

Has the well of previously undiscovered L.A. artists (to East Coast audiences, anyway) run dry? Apparently not, as Pat O'Neill's New York debut attests. Two films, five sculptures and twenty-odd drawings by the California artist, made since the 1960s, reveal preoccupations with slick surface and surreal juxtapositions that resonate with the post-Internet sensibility.

While Pat O’Neill is primarily known as an experimental filmmaker, this small retrospective, which filled two moodily lit galleries with five decades’ worth of sculptures, drawings, photographs, slides, and films, made a case for another, adjacent view of his practice—one concerned with fixed visual forms. In Untitled (Dingo 4), 1980, four identical gelatin silver prints of a dog appeared side by side, each overlain with a small photocopy that was partially obscured, in turn, by a different-colored paint chip—a frame-by-frame dissolve from color to color that recalled O’Neill’s movies.

If computers could dream, Pat O’Neill might be their Sigmund Freud. His multilayered films, sculptures, collages and drawings — in a mesmerizing mini-survey at Cherry and Martin — seem to be made from the deleted files, trashed photos and lost messages that are beyond the reach of our phones and notebooks but still out there in the ether, with the capacity to come back to haunt us, sometimes savagely.

This Friday, three of Mr. O’Neill’s films — “7362” from 1967; “Runs Good,” from 1970, and “Trouble in the Image,” from 1996 — will be shown as part of the film program at the Art Basel fair. The 99-seat theater is expected to be sold out.

Film is an increasingly important part of this year’s Art Basel — and, by extension, of the collectible contemporary art world. The film program, organized by Marc Glöde and This Brunner and running until Saturday, features a world premiere, a European premiere, and retrospective and thematic evenings.

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